The Black River of Loss
by burnmedown
Summary: Sonny wakes up in the hospital. His head hurts. He keeps forgetting things. And he's pretty sure there's something wrong with Clay.
1. When the Time Comes

**Author's Note:** I have chosen not to give content warnings up front because they're also major spoilers for this story. However, I always want warnings to be available if needed, so I've put them in the notes at the end so that you can scroll to the bottom if you want to be forewarned and don't mind getting spoiled. Keep in mind that this is quite different from everything else I've written for SEAL Team thus far.

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**I. When the Time Comes**

The first time Sonny manages to open his eyes, there are lights. They burrow like insects into his pupils. It hurts.

Soon afterward, there are sounds, too; noises that ring painfully in his ears and don't make any sense at all.

He blinks and the lights are suddenly, mercifully gone, leaving nothing but dark.

Sonny's head hurts. He can't think. He doesn't understand why.

Someone gives him a sip of water. It seems like this is later, long after the first blink and the lights, though he isn't sure why he thinks so.

It feels like there's a fire inside his skull, trying to burn its way out through his temple and his eye. He tries to talk, to beg the voices to help him, but he has forgotten how to put sounds together to make words.

When he tries to reach up, to find the source of the pain and make it go away, someone holds his wrists down and talks at him.

Sonny knows that voice.

_Jason. Boss._

He stops struggling, but then there's light and dark again, and he forgets that he isn't supposed to touch his head. He tries again, and there are different hands and a different voice - _Ray_ \- and then he remembers.

And then he forgets.

The next time he wakes up, his hands are strapped down. He doesn't like that. It scares him. Not knowing where he is scares him. Not having any words scares him.

There's a new voice, female. It makes him think of safety, laughter, drinking coffee at sunrise.

_Lisa._

She talks to him, touches his face, and even though deep down he's still scared, he calms. In the sounds she's making, he manages to find the shape of his own name: _Sonny._

How did he forget how to say his _name?_

When Lisa's lips brush his forehead, he manages to work up the courage to tentatively open his eyes. The light is dim enough to not hurt too badly, but there's enough illumination for him to see her face.

She's so beautiful. Has she always been this beautiful? Is that one of the things he forgot?

She smiles at him, and tears spill down her cheeks. When she leans forward to hug him, a choked gasp shudders through her.

He doesn't want her to cry, so he fights to find his voice, to remember how sounds fit together to make her name.

"Lisa."

It's a hoarse croak, slurred and strange, but her face lights up and she laughs while still crying, so he thinks he must have at least gotten the shape of it right.

Sonny sleeps again. Sometimes there are people he doesn't know. Things happen, but then slip through his fingers like sand as soon as he isn't thinking about them. He's pretty sure his sisters have visited at some point, but he doesn't remember when or for how long or what they said to him.

Gradually, he starts to figure out words again. He asks questions, forgets the answers, asks again. His short-term memory improves at least enough that they stop having to tie his hands down, which feels like a small victory.

His team comes to see him: Jason, Ray, Trent, Brock. Not Clay for a while. Sonny is starting to worry, but then late one night the kid shows up, leaning over his bed. It's dim in the room and Sonny can't quite make out Spenser's face, but he'd know that voice anywhere.

"Sonny?" Clay sounds scared. He sounds _terrified._ "Hey, Sonny, come on. Talk to me, buddy."

Sonny tries, he does, but he's real tired and can't seem to make his voice work.

Clay squeezes Sonny's shoulder. His hand is trembling. "Okay," he says. "Everything is okay. You're gonna be fine."

Sonny must fall asleep then, and when he wakes up Clay isn't there, but Lisa is. He likes it when Lisa is there. He gets real frustrated sometimes, can't seem to stop himself, yells at people and then can't remember why. Lisa never yells back or seems to get her feelings hurt, though she does sometimes tell him calmly and firmly to cut it out.

Then, when he apologizes after, she'll smile at him in that gentle way that makes him feel like everything is gonna be okay.

Lisa also brings him things. A Texas flag. A hat he can't wear because his head still hurts (and he's still not allowed to touch the epicenter of the pain). A small whiteboard with a marker he can use to write things down so he won't forget them. He's clumsy with the marker at first, but Lisa says it's good for his fine motor skills to try, and then she grins and tells him that his handwriting was never any good to begin with, anyway.

She's the one who's there when he finally gets up the nerve to ask, "What happened to me?"

Lisa meets his gaze, calm and steady. "You were shot in the head by a sniper. Do you want to see?"

His voice has abandoned him again, so he just nods wordlessly. He figured it was something like that, but hearing it somehow makes it feel horribly real. Causes pain to spike behind his eyes.

Lisa produces a hand mirror from somewhere, and then Sonny spends a few minutes just looking at himself.

It's disorienting. For all that his memories are still a little unsteady, he did have a very clear conception of what he's supposed to look like, and this ain't it.

The thick beard can't hide the fact that his face is much thinner than it should be, hollows hiding in the space beneath his cheekbones. And then there's the raised, zipper-like scar wrapped around the side of his head.

Truth be told, it isn't even the scar that bothers him. Based on the circumstances, he figured it would be ugly, and it's almost a relief to see that there's a visible external mark to go along with all the pain; a beacon that says to the world, _I am wounded._

No, the thing that really bothers him is the strip of hair surrounding the scar. It's shorter than the rest, obviously having been shaved off for surgery... and it has already grown back a hell of a lot more than Sonny expected.

Just how long has he been here, confused and out of it and too scrambled to keep track of time?

Lisa rests her hand on his shoulder and squeezes gently while he angles the mirror to get a better look at the scar.

He can't remember getting tagged. Not at all. In fact, he's not even sure of the last thing he _does_ remember, pre-shooting. He feels like the specifics are still in there somewhere, but they're slippery and hard to grasp. He remembers his life from before more in general terms, a closely held mental list of the important things, like:

Sonny's sisters are stubborn and contrary and sometimes overbearing, and he would never have become the man he is without them.

Lisa Davis is beautiful and strong and made of sunshine, and he knows, even when he knows little else, the sweet summer smell of her hair on the pillow next to him.

He would follow Jason Hayes anywhere. Anywhere. Right into a sniper's bullet with no regrets.

Ray Perry is probably the best human being Sonny knows, except that his wife is a maybe even better one.

If there is a way to keep his boys breathing, then by God Trent Sawyer will find it. Sonny figures it's probably on account of Trent that he's still alive at all.

There are very few things in this world that Brock Reynolds loves more than his dog. His team is at the top of that list.

And then there's Clay. Clay Spenser, who is brave and cocky and utterly, completely loyal, and one of the best friends Sonny has ever had.

Now that Sonny is actually starting to understand just how long he's been in this hospital room, concern gnaws at him, because he feels like he should have been seeing Clay a lot more than he has.

The one specific time Sonny does clearly recall being visited by his best friend, Clay seemed... off somehow. Not hurt, necessarily, but more stressed and agitated than the situation really called for. Did something happen on that fateful last mission that's causing him to stay away?

Sonny resolves to ask Jason about it first chance he gets, but late that same evening Clay visits again, and Sonny feels like things finally start to make sense.

Again, he wakes to find Clay already in the room with him, sitting down this time but still leaned forward intensely. The light is a little better now, just bright enough for Sonny to make out the corner of Clay's mouth, the shadowed hollow of his eye, the plane of one dirt-smudged cheekbone. Even though Sonny can't see most of Spenser's face, he knows his friend well enough to read the raw distress in Clay's visible features and his hunched-forward shoulders.

"I'm sorry, buddy." Clay's voice is very quiet. "God, I'm so sorry. This is on me. If I had just made the shot before..." He trails off, briefly presses his palm over his eyes, and then squeezes Sonny's hand between both of his own. "I'm gonna fix it, all right? I'm gonna find a way to make this okay. I promise."

Sonny wants to tell Clay that it's not his fault; that he's forgiven, always; that he doesn't need to bear the weight of fixing everything. But for some reason it always seems harder to find his words when Spenser is here, so Sonny ends up just drifting off to the quiet comfort of his friend holding his hand.

When he wakes up, though, Clay is gone again.

Soon after that, things really start getting busy. There's a lot of therapy. One therapist helps Sonny improve strength and coordination; he gets back on his feet, and after a while he's even steady enough to ditch the walker. Another therapist coaches him on strategies and coping mechanisms for daily life. He learns to make lists, to write things out step by step. It helps with the memory lapses, the executive dysfunction, the maddening fog of blank confusion that sometimes sets in halfway through brushing his teeth or showering.

He doesn't ask anyone about his chances of operating again. Somewhere deep down he knows what the answer will probably be, and he just isn't ready for that to be reality yet.

The other subject Sonny avoids is Clay. He has a vague sense that he has asked about him before, but can't remember the answer now. It hurts that his friend is staying away so much, but Sonny tells himself that he needs to give Spenser space, to let him work through whatever misplaced guilt he's currently trying to drown in.

Clay does eventually come back again, but it's not a visit that makes Sonny feel any better at all. Quite the opposite, in fact.

As usual, it's nighttime and there's no one else around. Clay leans forward over the bed, his entire face visible this time, skin streaked with dirt and soot like he just walked off a battlefield five minutes ago. Sonny smells sweat and gunpowder and blood.

Wearing a haunted, hollow thousand-yard stare, Clay runs a shaking hand over his dirty blond beard, then says in a hushed voice, "Look, Son, there's something I've got to go do, okay?" He ghosts his fingers over Sonny's cheek, gently cups the uninjured side of his head, and continues in a fierce whisper, "You're gonna be just fine, you hear me? You're the toughest son of a bitch I know, and you're gonna get through this. And I… I'll see you around, okay?" His voice breaks a little on those final words.

Sonny's instincts shout at him that something is very wrong, that he should grab Clay's wrist and keep him from leaving and force him to explain what the hell is going on, but instead his eyelids slide closed, and when he opens his eyes again it's dawn and the room is empty.

Jason is the first to visit that day, around mid-morning, and Sonny decides enough is enough. He asks him straight up about Clay.

Hayes gets that look on his face that means this is far from the first time they've had this conversation. He looks down at his hands, and then he asks abruptly, "Do you feel up to getting out of here for a little while?"

Despite the deflection from the topic Sonny really wants to discuss, his heart leaps a little, because _hell yes_ he does. He's been out on the hospital grounds a few times, but it's not enough to keep him from going a little stir-crazy in here.

Jason clears it with the doctor, and then he helps Sonny downstairs and into his truck, and then they're on their way.

"Where're we going?" Sonny asks, watching vaguely familiar scenery whiz by outside the window.

"To see Clay," is the only response Jason will give.

When they stop and get out, Sonny truly realizes just what a beautiful day it is. The grass is brilliant green and soft underfoot, and there are flowers everywhere. The bright sunlight is probably going to give him one of those searing headaches he gets now, but it will be worth it.

Sonny would like to stand still, just staring at the world, but Jason gently takes his arm and guides him to their destination.

He doesn't want to look. Jason forces him to. Takes his shoulders and turns him until he's facing the headstone.

He already knows what it's gonna say.

_This is wrong,_ he wants to tell Jason. _I just saw him last night. He came to visit me._ But that's not right, is it? That must have been from before. That was just his memories getting tangled up again.

The inscription on the headstone feels all wrong: name, dates, rank. The facts are correct, but it's too sterile, too brief and simple to capture a personality and a life as big as Spenser's. This whole place is too still and silent - but then Clay is too, isn't he? He's silent now, and always will be.

"Jace," Sonny says, and then his voice dissolves. He covers his face.

Jason pulls Sonny into a tight hug. "We brought him home, Son," he tells him, voice thick with tears. "We found him and we brought him home."

"But I wanted- I wanted him to-"

"I know. So did I."

For so long, all Sonny has wanted is to get better. To fit all the fragments of his mind back together.

Now he's terrified that he will, and it will mean he never gets to see his friend again, not even in the false refuge of those tatters of memory that feel present and real.

Eventually Sonny gets himself together enough to ask, "How'd he die?"

Please let it have been quick and bright and painless. Clay deserved that much.

Jason goes still, pulls back, and drags a shaking hand over his face. He looks... shattered. Sonny's recollection might still be a little scrambled, but he's pretty sure he never remembers seeing that expression on his team leader's face. Not even after Nate died.

His voice nearly toneless, Jason starts from the beginning. "You and Clay were together when you got tagged. He pulled you into cover, but the two of you were cut off and pinned down. Clay went out to draw them off, try to give us a chance to get to you."

Jason pauses. Sonny's heart thrashes against his ribs as he waits.

Quiet and raw, Jason says, "He got captured. We didn't have a chance of getting to him. Figured we'd track him down later, pull off a rescue." Another hesitation; then, his voice on the edge of cracking, he continues, "They had him for two weeks. Two goddamn weeks, and we were a day too late. Not even. He'd been dead six, maybe eight hours when we found him."

Sonny feels like he's been hit by another sniper's bullet, right through the lung. The pain pierces all the way through his chest. Distantly, he feels Jason's hands on his shoulders, pulling him back in, holding him up from falling.

After a while, Jason adds, "Mandy tried. She tried everything. It wasn't good enough."

_Mandy._ Somehow Sonny had forgotten about her. Hadn't even thought to wonder why she hadn't visited in all this time.

Jason exhales. "She, uh, asked for a transfer. Won't be working with us anymore. Maybe she thought we wouldn't be able to forgive her. Or maybe she just couldn't forgive herself."

Sonny nods and pulls back out of the hug, though Jason keeps a hand on his shoulder to steady him. There are tears on Sonny's face. He brushes them away. He wants to stop now, to not have to talk about this anymore, but he has to know. As much as he can. Everything there is.

"Did they execute him?"

Jason drops his gaze. His mouth twists. "That's the hell of it. We don't think they even meant to kill him so soon. Just went too far. Autopsy said he died of respiratory failure."

Sonny nods again, numbly. Can't keep himself from asking, "And you're sure-"

Hayes squeezes his shoulder. "It was him, Son." His voice cracks. "His tags were missing, but yeah. It was him. We all saw him. We carried him home."

There's just one more question he has to ask. "Did y'all kill them?"

Jason meets Sonny's gaze, his expression caught somewhere between satisfied and haunted. "Every fucking one."

"Good," Sonny breathes. "That's good."

He looks down, taking in the headstone, the emerald grass, the flowers. The horrible, suffocating stillness.

All this time, Clay has been dead.

By the time Sonny woke up from his coma, his best friend was already gone.

For weeks now, Sonny's brain has been feeding him bits of the past, misplaced scraps of memory that got scrambled because of the head injury.

The last memories he will ever have of his best friend.

It hurts. It hurts so goddamn much, but he's thankful, too, that those moments weren't lost. Not entirely. His head, even with a bullet in it, knew what was important. Found a way to hang onto those memories, to give them back to him when he was ready.

Clay worrying. Clay apologizing. Clay saying goodbye.

Later, when he's out of the hospital and doing better, Sonny brings whiskey to the grave. He drinks some and pours some out onto the dirt that covers his brother's body, and then, aloud to the soft silence, he answers all of the questions that he couldn't when Clay was still around to hear.

_I'll be okay, little buddy. I'll pull through, I promise. I've still got a whole life to live._

(It hurts a little extra that Spenser died without knowing if Sonny was all right. For Clay, the story of his team ended with his best friend lying near death with a bullet in his head, and he won't ever get to hear that it turned out okay. That he made it turn out okay.)

_Please don't be sorry. There's nothing to forgive. Thank you for what you did. For who you were._

_Goodbye. Love you, brother._

With time, Sonny recovers well enough to live a normal life, a good life, but not to operate again. It takes a while, but he's able to find new purpose.

It helps that now nobody can tell him and Davis they aren't allowed to get married.

Sonny has never really been a fan of naming children as a tribute to dead friends or loved ones. He's always thought it's kind of morbid; that a kid doesn't deserve to be saddled with that kind of baggage right out of the womb.

He and Lisa end up naming their first son Clay anyway.

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_Every year  
__everything  
__I have ever learned_

_in my lifetime  
__leads back to this: the fires  
__and the black river of loss  
__whose other side_

_is salvation,  
__whose meaning  
__none of us will ever know.  
__To live in this world_

_you must be able  
__to do three things:  
__to love what is mortal;  
__to hold it_

_against your bones knowing  
__your own life depends on it;  
__and, when the time comes to let it go,  
__to let it go._

_\- from "In Blackwater Woods," by Mary Oliver_

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**Content warnings:** This story contains the death of a main character and the permanently life-altering injury of another main character.

**Note:** I'm sorry. Please don't hate me.


	2. Twice as Many Stars

**II. Twice as Many Stars**

When Amira is finally ready, when she knows she can't wait any longer to fulfill her vow, the first thing she does is start trying to track down Sonny Quinn.

It takes a while, but finally she manages to pinpoint a current town, and after that, an actual address. When she sees it on the screen, she stares for a while with her heart thudding almost painfully against her ribs, because this makes it all real. Sonny Quinn is an actual person, not just a name, a mythical character from a trauma-fogged, half-remembered story. He is real and alive, and it is her duty to find him.

After that, there's a series of logical next steps to take. She notifies her boss that she'll finally be using her two weeks of vacation. She purchases plane tickets and a hotel room; having spent so much of her early life with nothing, part of her still reels at the cost, struggling to accept that she really does now have the resources to cover such extravagant expense. She forces herself to confirm the purchases, even though doing so makes anxiety claw at her throat for hours afterward.

Then she thinks about what she'll do, what she'll say once she's finally face to face with the man, and the anxiety only grows worse, crushing her chest until she struggles to breathe.

What if he doesn't believe her?

What if he does, and still hates her anyway?

She pulls the chain up from its hiding place beneath the neckline of her modest dress, running her fingers over the tags again and again until the panic starts to ease.

All she can do is try. She has to. She made a promise.

From the airport, she hires a car to take her to the hotel so she can drop off her belongings, and then from the hotel to the address where Sonny Quinn supposedly lives.

The house is not fancy, but it's nice all the same, newly painted and surrounded by trees and flowering shrubs. Off to one side, there's a garden, tomatoes ripening to a rich red beneath protective netting. There are children's toys on the porch and a few scattered across the lawn.

It's clearly not just a house but someone's home, comfortable and loved and lived-in. With all its lush greenery, it looks very little like Amira's childhood home, but the sight of it makes her throat ache anyway. She had something like this once, so very long ago, before the shouting and the bullets and her father dead on his back in the dust with his hand reaching toward her.

Pulling away from the dangerous threads of memory, Amira looks at the front of the house. She steels herself, taking deep breaths, trying to fight off the powerful urge to run away. Once she knocks on that door, there will be no going back.

She has already waited longer than she should have. No more. She has a vow to keep.

The man who answers her knock has kind eyes and a neatly trimmed beard. There's a tan, curly-haired toddler propped on his hip. "Yeah?" He drawls.

Amira's mouth is so dry that her lips stick to her teeth. She has to swallow twice before managing to get the words out. "Are you Sonny Quinn?"

He squints at her and shifts the little boy, who nestles in closer, peering with big brown eyes at the stranger. "Who wants to know?"

"My name is Amira," she says. Now that she's managed to start talking, the words tumble out. "I… I knew a friend of yours. Six years ago. He was very kind to me, and he asked me to find you, if I survived." She pauses, breathing through her nose, trying to fight off tears and panic. "I am sorry it took me so long."

The man has gone very pale. "What the hell kind of a joke is this?" He asks in a quiet, dangerous tone. His eyes are no longer kind at all.

Amira shakes her head wordlessly. She pulls the chain out from under her shirt. Lifting the dog tags over her head and holding them out to the man feels like surrendering a piece of her soul. She does it anyway.

"He said to give these to you. Or to Jason Hayes if I couldn't find you."

Sonny Quinn draws a sharp breath, reaching out to accept the tags. They are worn from years of Amira rubbing her fingers over them - which she feels suddenly, keenly ashamed of - but the letters and numbers are still legible.

For six years, those dog tags have served as Amira's talisman, her anchor, her reminder that there is good in the world. In the early days, she kept them hidden, knowing their discovery could cost her life. Later, through an endless series of refugee camps and dingy, crowded apartments, she never took them off. Not until today.

Quinn closes his hand over the tags. When he glances back up, the look in his eyes makes her take a quick step back, out of arm's reach. His voice is a soft, graveled growl when he asks, "How did you get these?"

Amira tries to swallow again, only succeeding in making a dry noise in the back of her throat. "He gave them to me. At the end, when he knew..." She trails off. Can tell by Quinn's expression that he does not believe her, even though she is telling him the truth.

What was it Clay told her to say? _Think, Amira._ If she isn't able to remember it, word for word, she might be about to get murdered by a quiet man with a toddler on his hip, and that would be a shame after everything she has survived.

"He said you might not believe me," she continues. "He said to tell you that you were right, in Jalalabad, about the leg…" What is the English word? Why can't she remember? "Pocket," she tries.

Sonny Quinn's face drains of color. "Pouch," he whispers. "His leg pouch."

"That's it! Leg pouch," she finishes triumphantly. Then she takes a quick step forward, because Quinn is swaying and grabbing for the door frame with his free hand, and Amira has to get her arms out to at least try to catch the little boy if his father falls.

Quinn doesn't fall. After just a few seconds, he steadies himself, takes a deep breath, and looks at Amira with a neutral expression but eyes full of grief. "Reckon you'd better come in," he says quietly, and steps aside to let her pass.

The interior of the house is much like the outside: mostly tidy, but cozy and lived-in. Sonny Quinn shows Amira to a chair, then takes a seat across from her, lifting the quiet, somewhat clingy toddler into his lap, where the child pops a thumb into his mouth and gazes at Amira with wide brown eyes.

Quinn looks down at the tags in his hand. "So," he says, a little shakily. "You were there. When..."

Amira nods. Her voice has gotten caught in her throat again.

Clay's friend, the man he asked her to find, pushes the baseball cap back on his head, revealing a long, faded scar peeking out of salt-and-pepper hair. He exhales. "I don't even know what to ask first." There's a pause, and when Amira doesn't start talking, Quinn ventures, "You knew Clay?"

As Amira nods mutely again, the little boy pops his head up and pulls his thumb from his mouth, looking curiously up at his father's face. Quinn notices and pats the child on the head with a soft, fond smile. "Not you, buddy," he says gently. "Your Uncle Clay."

The child's expression brightens. He hops down off the couch, runs into another room, and returns with a framed photograph. Holding it up, he points at one of the men in the picture, and cautiously turns to show it to Amira as well.

It's Clay.

She had almost forgotten his face. Remembered it only in disconnected flashes; the bright blue eyes, mostly, and the kindness in them when he looked at her. But that is definitely him.

Of course, she never saw him as he was in this picture. It's of him and a younger Sonny, arms slung around each other, faces lit up with uncomplicated happiness. By the time Amira met the fair-haired American, he was already beaten and bloody, though the defiant light in his eyes never dimmed, not until the very end.

This is how Amira remembers him: caged and hurt and dying, and yet all the time a beacon against the dark.

She doesn't realize how far her mind has drifted back until Sonny's words draw her out to the present again. "Can you tell me what happened?" His voice is unexpectedly gentle, like it was when he spoke to his young son.

Amira doesn't know where else to start, so she starts at the beginning.

The men who captured Clay, who killed him, had purchased her some time before that. Months before, or years. She isn't sure. She tries not to remember.

This is hard. She knew it would be. Her memories of him are all tangled up with other, darker things, and she can't pull at one thread without the entire tapestry coming unraveled. She clenches her fists in the fabric of her skirt and keeps talking anyway, because she promised.

During her time there, she almost forgot she was human. To survive, she learned to make herself into a walking doll, a hollow husk of a girl that followed orders and cared about nothing at all.

And then they sent her to bring water to a pale American captive, and he looked at her with bright, pain-filled eyes and saw a person.

In her own language, accented but legible, he asked her if she was all right.

He tried to raise a shackled, shaking hand to her bruised face, and he asked, with caged anger and open concern in his voice, if they had hurt her.

She pulled away, put down the water and left without responding, but it shook her. It reminded her that she had once been allowed to feel things, to be hurt, to expect care and concern when she was.

It was dangerous. She had worked so hard to be empty, to feel nothing, to plod with her head down until God finally, mercifully let her die, and then this one strange man looked at her and spoke to her and ruined it all.

Her every instinct told her to stay away, but she couldn't. She sneaked back to see him, going not to the door but to the outer wall of the cell, concealed behind a hedge of tangled, prickly acacia, where there was a crack she could whisper to him through.

It was there that she learned his name, and gave him hers.

In a flood of words that tumbled over each other, she told him about her parents, and their deaths, and how she had been sold after.

He told her he was sorry, and then he told her about his friends, about how much he loved them, how certain he was that they would rescue him. He promised her that if they did, _when_ they did, he would find a way to take her along, to safety.

Curled in the dark, thorn-scraped and dusty and desperate, she let herself hope.

She knew it was stupid, and did it anyway.

Amira came back again and again during those days, or maybe weeks, that Clay was there and alive. She had long since learned when the captors weren't paying attention, when they wouldn't miss her, and she used that knowledge to visit the American as often as she could.

He told her stories from books. He told her that there was a world outside of this place, a world where there was light and hope and a future, and she only had to hang on long enough to find her way back to it. He repeated this again and again as his voice shook with pain and grew steadily weaker, and she tried for his sake to believe it, because she thought he probably needed that hope every bit as much as she did.

It was toward the end, when he must have truly come to understand he was dying, that he passed her the tags and made her promise that when she got out of here, she would give them to Sonny Quinn or Jason Hayes and tell them what happened.

_When_ she got out of here, he said, with so much certainty, and so Amira blinked away tears and closed her hand around the chain and swore to him that she would.

As it turned out, she didn't even have to sneak around to be there when he died.

The captors hadn't meant to kill him, not so quickly. They had played at nearly drowning him over and over, and he had coughed and coughed afterward, and then his breathing started to crackle and fade. They brought Amira in and gave her wet cloths and whatever medicine they could scrape together, and they ordered her brusquely to keep him alive, as though her slender hands could somehow mend what they had broken.

At the end, they were busy arguing amongst themselves, laying blame for the unintended loss of a valuable captive. They didn't even glance over to notice that Amira held Clay's hand, that she leaned forward to whisper to him, that he fixed his eyes on her face and managed a faint smile just minutes before his breathing stopped.

After, they beat her for 'letting him die,' and she disappeared from her own mind until it was over. Then she went back to her squalid quarters, pulled out the dog tags from their hiding place, and held them while she cried and cried until she thought her heart would crack in two.

Only hours later, the shooting started.

It wasn't the first time, or the second, or the tenth that there had been violence in the camp. Amira didn't know what was happening. With the rest of the women, she fled into the desert.

It didn't even occur to her until much later that it might have been Clay's friends, coming for him, just a little too late.

By then, she had parted from the others, found the strength and resolve to keep going until she reached the nearest village. From there she went to a refugee camp and then finally to America, to a city called Houston where the air was thick and it rained too much but the people were mostly kind to her.

When she finishes the story, Sonny is quiet for a long time. He has leaned his face into his hands, hiding from her, not responding to the worried shoulder taps he's receiving from his wide-eyed son. At last Quinn wipes away tears, looks up at her and asks in a hoarse voice, "Was he scared? At the end?"

Amira, still working to fight free of the dark memories that claw at her lungs, gives him the most reassuring smile she can manage. "I do not think he was. He seemed... calm. He smiled at me. And for as long as he could still talk, he recited poetry quietly to himself. I heard him do that many times, for comfort, I think." She feels her smile shift, becoming more genuine as she remembers the poems, the way his voice lilted over the rhythm of them. That was one of the reasons she'd trusted Clay so readily; he had reminded her of her father.

Quinn gives a laugh that cracks into a sob. Brushing away more tears, he says, "Of course he did. That kid loved books."

For a moment, there's silence. Sonny Quinn pulls his son into his lap, letting the concerned little boy pat his face and then draw him into an child's fierce embrace. Amira looks down at her hands, uncertain what to say now that her story is told, her task finally done. She feels tired and achy and washed out, like after she's just recovered from a fever or spent a long time crying.

"Look," Sonny says, once he's steadied himself a bit. "This, uh... I don't even know how to tell you how much it means."

Amira nods, awkward, unsure how to respond. Is it over? Can she leave now?

"Are you gonna be around for a while?" Quinn asks her. "There's, well, a lot of other people who sure could stand to hear this too."

The thought of going through this all over again dries up much of the relief. Amira clasps her hands together in her lap, and she draws a shaky breath and reminds herself that she promised.

Clay showed her that she was human and that she mattered, gave her hope that carried her through to a new life, and in return she made him a vow. She will not break it.

So she gives Sonny Quinn her phone number, and a few days later when he has made the necessary arrangements, she comes back to his house again.

There are many people here now, most of whom have names that sound familiar. Jason Hayes, of course, and also the rest of Clay's friends whom he loved, including Sonny's wife Lisa. Facing them all is intimidating, but Amira breathes and tells herself that she has already done this once before, and she has survived so much worse, and it will be fine.

At the last moment, when Amira is about to start, the door opens and another woman slips inside, keeping her gaze down. She's pale and has very dark hair.

For a moment the room goes still and very quiet; then Sonny's wife breaks into a smile, jumps to her feet, and pulls the newcomer into a tight hug. "Mandy! I'm so glad you could make it," she says, and leads the pale woman to a seat.

When silence descends again, Amira begins.

She tells them the same things she told Sonny, plus more scattered details that have been coming back over the past few days. When there are questions, she answers them as best she can.

She tells them that Clay made up crude nicknames for each one of his captors, and that he never for a moment seemed afraid of them.

She tells them that he was brave and that he did not die alone.

There are some tears, but even more smiles. After it's over, Lisa hands off her son to Jason Hayes, crosses the room to Amira, and asks if it's all right to give her a hug. At Amira's tentative nod, Lisa draws her in, holds her close, and whispers, "Thank you."

Amira just nods again, unable to find her voice. She feels so drained that her legs are shaking.

She gives out her contact information, accepts more words of kindness from these people who loved Clay, and then finally, mercifully, she gets to go back to the safe, quiet refuge of her own hotel room.

That night when Amira crawls into the bed that is temporarily hers, she automatically reaches for the dog tags, only to remember all over again that they're gone now. She'll have to find something to replace them with. A new ritual.

She squeezes her eyes shut and rubs her empty fingertips together and whispers, "I did it, Clay. I found your family. I kept my promise."

The answering silence clogs her throat with renewed grief for all the things she has lost. Safe in the dark, she recites, her voice joined by the soft echoes of memory:

"_And as he stares into the sky, there are  
__twice as many stars as usual."_

* * *

_But tonight he is alive and in the north  
__field with his mother. It is a perfect  
__summer evening: the moon rising over  
__the orchard, the wind in the grass. And  
__as he stares into the sky, there are  
__twice as many stars as usual._

_\- from "Two-Headed Calf," by Laura Gilpin_


End file.
